Maybe we should simply mature as a species and realize that we shouldn’t judge people on clothing beyond basic standards of modesty and hygiene. It’s just cloth. I don’t want to have to work with someone of any gender that’s not wearing tops and bottoms. But as long as your groin is covered and your bare chest isn’t showing, we shouldn’t care what someone wears, as long as its clean and well kept.

The entire idea of “professional” clothing in the first place is to separate people into artificial social classes to make them easier to divide and conquer. If the guys in the office and on the shop floor are both wearing jeans and t-shirts, it’s easier for them to feel solidarity with each other. Are you a factory owner? Make the guys on the shop floor wear coveralls while the guys in the office wear suits, and now you’ve separated your employees into two distinct camps you can play off against each other. And if you make it so “the professionals” who make the decisions are visually distinct from the common laborers, it cements their position of authority and encourages obedience.

“Professional attire” has always been about control. Nothing more.

Literal Pavlovian conditioning.

I mean, Einstein did spend an afternoon testing Mr. Reich’s sexbox.

One afternoon, Albert Einstein spent an afternoon studying a box that was supposed to harness cosmic sex energy. This happened. Really.

One of the creepiest things about LLMs is they respond better when you’re polite to them, and worse if you’re rude. Of course, this isn’t because they actually get offended. They’re simply trained on as much text as possible and trained to imitate it. And real human beings, if you ask them a question while calling them names and insulting them, are very unlikely to give you a good answer. If you’re polite with people, they’re more likely to be helpful. ChatGPT can’t feel the feelings a human would when a user calls it a bastard or asks “please,” but it can imitate the reactions a human would demonstrate to such a prompt.

But have you seen this?

OTH, you can make a flathead screw with a rod, a hammer, and a hacksaw.

Better make it an impact driver, just to be sure.

Today the high was 67 and it will top out in the low 80s through the next week.

In the winter months it’s humid. In the summer the Willamette Valley isn’t very humid. Currently it’s 46% humidity as I type this.

<Laughs in Willamette Valley.>